The Marshall Plan was a system established by American Secretary of State George Marshall to rebuild the economies and infrastructure of Western Europe following the damage of World War Two. The goal was to rebuild the European economy and reestablish Western Europe as a major trade partner of America, not to mention one that would have similar goals regarding the promotion of capitalism and the elimination of communism.

During the Cold War, the primary foreign policy of the United States was to try and prevent the spread of communism to other nations. This policy was called containment. It led to directly to the United States’ involvement in Korea and Vietnam, as well as other smaller conflicts.

The Domino Theory relates to the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment that was the most important part of American foreign policy during the majority of the Cold War. The Domino Theory states that if one country falls to communism it will very likely spread to any neighboring countries. As such, America must prevent any country from falling to communism by any means that it can—or so the theory goes.

The Fair Deal was a series of domestic reforms encouraged by President Harry Truman. It represents a sort of extension of the New Deal program of his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Fair Deal was concerned with establishing a higher minimum wage and ending unemployment.

During the early years of the Cold War, the United States and China had almost no diplomatic contact and certainly no trade agreements. China was firmly sided with the Soviet Union against the United States; however, in 1972 President Richard Nixon made a formal visit to China in an attempt to reopen trade between the two nations and normalize relations. The visit is considered the greatest foreign policy success of the Nixon administration.

The answer which occurred the most recently is the Vietnam War. The Civil War was fought from 1861 until 1865; the Spanish-American War was fought in 1898; World War Two was fought from 1939 until 1945; The Korean War was fought from 1950 until 1953; the Vietnam War was fought from 1965 until 1976. The Vietnam War began during the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and did not end until after Nixon had been forced out of office by the Watergate scandal.

The Domino Theory was an important part of American foreign policy throughout much of the Cold War. It states that, if one country falls under the influence of communism, the neighboring countries are likely to follow suit. The theory was first suggested by President Eisenhower to try and encourage support for the French forces in Vietnam.

The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962, when the Soviet Union installed nuclear weapons in Cuba, less than ninety miles from United States’ soil. The American President at the time was John F. Kennedy, and the leader of the Soviet Union was Nikita Khrushchev. The result of the incident was that the Soviet Union ended up withdrawing it’s nuclear weapons from Cuba under the agreement that the United States would remove its from Turkey. For the short period of time that the Cuban Missile Crisis raged, it is generally considered to be the closest that the two superpowers got to nuclear annihilation during the long Cold War.

Sputnik was a Soviet satellite. It was the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. This took place in 1957 and began the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Sputnik was important, geopolitically speaking, for promoting panic in the United States that America was getting left behind by the more scientifically and technologically advanced Soviets. It can be seen as the reason why America landed on the moon only twelve years later.

Although the Bay of Pigs Invasion was planned during the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, it was not actually carried out until 1961, during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy. It was a failed American invasion of Cuba and is important in the larger context of the Cold War for solidifying the complete deterioration of American relations with Cuba and for precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis only a year later.